Collectively, we now create as much content every two days as existed between the dawn of time and 2003. This content explosion has played havoc on our attention spans: the length of time we are able to focus on any single thing online has dwindled as low as eight seconds, by some estimates.

With audiences grappling with a massive surplus in content and deficit of attention, the headline has become the most important thing brands need to get right to make an impact with their in-feed native ad campaigns. Consumers are living inside their content feeds, typically spending three hours a day inside apps. More and more, people read headlines while watching muted videos.

There’s an expectation that the explosion in available content and increasing reliance on headlines can only lead to a rise in cheap-trick, clickbait-styled headlines. But at Sharethrough, we’ve seen the opposite. With increasingly high demands on audience attention, brands need to be more straight-forward and human than ever in the way they present information to audiences. Successful headlines today engage the brain, communicating an idea at the moment of impression while still enticing readers to click through to a full content experience.

Introducing An AI-Powered Guide For Better Native Headlines

At Sharethrough, we’ve been using data science and linguistic analysis for years to understand how these new media dynamics are affecting brands. As a result, we’re excited to announce our new AI-powered headline analyzer, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool that puts this wealth of proprietary knowledge at brands' fingertips for the first time. This new tool is free for anyone looking to navigate the new pressures and demands in content marketing, helping them analyze and quickly improve the quality of their headlines, optimizing for both impression and engagement.

Headlines optimized using this new tool saw a 14 percent lift in click-through rate, while headlines with an engagement score greater than 80 saw 28 percent lift.

Our AI headline analyzer offers insights into how language choices affect the value of each impression, which draws upon thousands of campaigns and headlines that have run through the Sharethrough Exchange. It includes findings from research conducted by Sharethrough with Nielsen Neuro Labs, which looked at the subconscious impact of different words on the human-brain and identified four categories of ‘Context Words’ that impact emotional engagement.

We combined this neuro-linguistic programming with a multivariate regression algorithm that helps to improve clickthrough rates: breaking down 312 unique variables, including EEG data and Natural Language Processing, and analyzing headlines for words from 21 statistically significant dictionaries.

With increasingly high demands on audience attention, brands need to be more straight-forward and human than ever in the way they present information to audiences.

Our headline analyzer does more than simply help brands be more engaging; it helps them make a more lasting impression on the vast majority of people that will never click on their in-feed ads. Because optimizing for engagement alone may draw in 1 percent more people, but optimizing for impression can influence the behavior and perception for the other 99 percent.

Proven results, easy to use

Our new headline analyzer packs all of Sharethrough's data and insight into one easy-to-navigate interface, an AI-powered statistician to help brands write better headlines. When a marketer inputs a headline into it, the algorithm calculates a Headline Quality Score: in itself a blend of two unique scores (also provided) that measure i) how likely the headline will lead to user engagement, and ii) how likely the headline will be to deliver value at the impression level, even for people who do not click.

This is no research exercise. In early tests, our new headline analyzer displayed proven results in helping brands make a more meaningful impression with their native advertising campaigns. Headlines optimized using this tool saw a 14 percent lift in click-through rate, while headlines with an engagement score greater than 80 saw 28 percent lift. It is already in wide use with over 20 Sharethrough clients, with major global brands like Coca-Cola, Amex, Verizon and General Mills and leading agencies Edelman and Weber Shandwick all putting it to excellent use already.

"I check all the headlines I write in Sharethrough's headline analyzer to make sure my copy is on point to drive the best performance possible,” said Denise Nilan from CBS Interactive.

This new tool for brands provides actionable tips for improving the quality of a given headline and clear direction for native advertising best practices, based on real-time analysis of a headline against a dictionary of almost 13,000 words and a blacklist of words that can promote negative brand associations.

How Does It Work?

Sharethrough's headline analyzer helps marketers improve the effectiveness of their copy through easy to follow, common sense directions. Each headline is scored out of 100, which is broken down into an Impression Score and an Engagement Score.

Master the Impression

For marketers that achieve an engagement rate or clickthrough rate even as high as 2 percent, there are still 98 percent of people that only saw the impression and never clicked. Because of this, marketers need to write copy that creates positive brand perceptions through impression alone.

The headline analyzer's Impression Score stems from Sharethrough’s in-depth performance data on native advertising, pulling in research conducted with Nielsen Neuro Labs that uncovered four categories of ‘Context Words’ that impact emotional engagement. Sharethrough used its own platform data to validate the impact of these words and narrow it down to a list of the most powerful 1,072 words. The Impression Score also examines how word choice informs the reader of the core message and how positive and descriptive words create favorable brand associations.